Connected through "AWE": creating immersive experiences for social connection

Do you get enough “awe” in your life? In our busy day-to-day lives, we often take our expe­ri­ences for granted. While we have the tech­nol­ogy to con­nect with one another, like smart phones, we don’t nec­es­sar­ily get out­side with nature, or stargaze. Such activ­i­ties may con­sist of common awe-inspiring moments, and we now under­stand that feel­ing awe is asso­ci­ated with all sorts of social and well­ness ben­e­fits. But, how do we get more awe when it feels like our lives are get­ting busier, with light pol­lu­tion that obscures the stars, and when travel may not be phys­i­cally or finan­cially fea­si­ble? With this research project, we are study­ing how we can design awe-inspiring vir­tual real­ity envi­ron­ments that are avail­able for people to try, and what hap­pens to people when they are inside these envi­ron­ments. From May 2016, we began under­tak­ing the cre­ation of a new immer­sive VR envi­ron­ment for induc­ing ‘awe’ in immersants.

An imm­er­sant in our ‘AWE’ immer­sive VR envi­ron­ment, using the ‘Limbic Chair’ for navigation.

From Mount Everest to your child­hood home– what do these two places have in common? They are both places you can vir­tu­ally fly to in immer­sive Google Earth VR and have the expe­ri­ence of awe. We first pre­sented find­ings in March 2017, where we learned that par­tic­i­pants’ awe could be val­i­dated through a phys­i­o­log­i­cal indi­ca­tion of raised goose bumps on the skin, often accom­pa­nied by ‘fris­son’, a pleas­ant sen­sa­tion of chills. Many people know ‘fris­son’ from lis­ten­ing to music and from watch­ing pow­er­ful scenes in movies. As it turns out, this phys­i­o­log­i­cal mea­sure is a great indi­ca­tor of a moment of felt awe, and is even more pow­er­ful when we use sys­tems like VR that involve many senses. In our stud­ies, it turns out that these goose bump induc­ing moments also cor­re­lated with high rat­ings of awe among par­tic­i­pants. Have a look at our brief video below for the IEEE VR 3D User Interface Symposium for more information.

Perhaps, VR could make expe­ri­ences of awe more avail­able to people who need them.

Using our knowl­edge on awe in VR, we opted to create an ‘awe-inspiring well­ness envi­ron­ment (AWE)’ with our part­ners at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. Between the iSpace Lab and a team of Masters of Digital Media cohort, we iter­ated a pro­to­type VR envi­ron­ment that takes an imm­er­sant on a jour­ney through time and space. The envi­ron­ment doesn’t use hand con­trollers or com­pli­cated game mechan­ics to nav­i­gate, and fea­tures a scene that allows for full envi­ron­ment explo­ration, and also guided scenes where the imm­er­sant is led. Immersants simply lean in the direc­tion they wish to go.

Many imm­er­sants report feel­ings of per­sonal con­nec­tion to the guide, which is a mys­te­ri­ous crea­ture of light. During the experience’s climax, imm­er­sants have reported deep thoughts about their place in the world. We have a lot of work to do with the envi­ron­ment, as we aim to re-iterate with our par­tic­i­pants in the com­mu­nity through the process of co-creation. Our goal is that our sub­se­quent envi­ron­ment in 2018 will allow for even more excit­ing, intu­itive inter­faces, and yet more awe-inspiring features.

We con­tinue to work on our EarthGazing research, which aims to study the ‘Overview Effect (OE)’ in VR. The OE also encom­passes awe as part of the spec­trum of emo­tions that may help shift perspectives.